The other side of Lois Lerner’s bureaucratic persecution is the light touch the IRS gave liberal groups, as the director of the IRS’s Exempt Organization Unit, which refused to enforce federal tax and election laws for those on the left.

In addition to taking money from funders of Democracy Alliance, a fund raising consortium George Soros assembled 10 years ago to pool money from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley liberals, The EHC takes money from Rob McKay’s Sacramento Street Partners. McKay, the multimillionaire son of the late Taco Bell founder Rob McKay, Sr., is the head of Democracy Alliance.

It is not that Lerner failed to investigate irregularities. Lerner failed to take action on violations spelled out in the EHC and in its sister organization’s own filings.

The force behind the EHC is Diane Takvorian, one of the pioneers in the movement to merge environmental politics with ethno-poverty agitation. In 1998, President William J. Clinton appointed Takvorian to the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission. Takvorian participated in the 2008 transition team for President Barack Obama, who appointed her to the Joint Public Advisory Committee of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the environmental partnership with Canada and Mexico.

Takvorian created Sept. 18, 2012 the Environmental Health and Justice Campaign Fund working to elect Bob Filner for Mayor 2012 (EHJC Fund). The activist endorsed Filner and helped elect Robert E. Filner the first Democratic mayor of San Diego in two decades.

The EHC and the EHJC Fund shared an address in National City, California. The address is actually the office address of Tony Pettina, a EHJC board member and the EHC’s chief financial officer. The difference is that the EHC is a 501(c)3 and the EHJC Fund is a partisan independent expenditure campaign committee.

The 501(c)3 are charitable organizations, whose contributions are tax-deductible and whose contributors must be disclosed to the IRS. Its political activities are tightly restricted.

The EHJC Fund paid EHC $15,832.35 for its campaign work for Alvarez, who lost in a special election.

The Internal Revenue Service absolutely prohibits all section 501(c)(3) organizations from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.

According to the IRS: “Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.”

Yet, nothing was done.

No administration has made more out of “prosecutorial discretion” than the Obama White House for political advantage. Invoking this discretion, Obama gave de facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens whom he declines to prosecute.

Another term for prosecutorial discretion is: “hall pass.”

At the IRS, Lois Lerner, a frequent guest at the White House, threw hundreds of applications for Tea Party and conservative groups into an administrative purgatory, effectively freezing their operations, because for months on end contributors could not be told if their contributions or names would be disclosed.

While Lerner knee-capped Obama’s political opposition, she gave a hall pass to the EHC and the EHJC Fund, run by an Obama administration appointee and a supporter of the Democratic Party in the San Diego-area.

Neil W. McCabe is the editor of HE's "Guns & Patriots" e-letter and was a senior reporter at the Human Events newspaper. McCabe deployed with the Army Reserve to Iraq for 15 months as a combat historian. For many years, he was a reporter and photographer for "The Pilot," Boston's Catholic paper. He was also the editor of the free community papers "The Somerville (Mass.) News and "The Alewife (North Cambridge, Mass.)." Email him: [email protected] Follow him on Twitter: @neilwmccabe.
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